Many industries that manufacture or use batteries conduct testing and certification of those batteries before they are put in service. In a number of these tests, a battery is punctured or heated to cause the battery to produce a fire having a flame. The fire may be characterized by the flame's length, width and angle, its velocity, and/or its duration. This characterization may then be used to draw conclusions about the battery's quality, safety risks and use feasibility.
In current battery testing techniques, a flame's dimensions, velocity and duration are manually extracted from images or video. These current techniques can only capture the visible flame (continuous flame and intermittent flame) but not the heat released by the flame (buoyant plume), which currently requires a thermal camera to capture or view. In addition to being expensive, thermal cameras have many limitations. These cameras are generally incapable of capturing images or video through most types of glass and clear materials that are often used to isolate the test environment. A thermal camera could be placed in the test environment or otherwise in close proximity to the battery under test, but at the undesirable risk of damaging the expensive equipment or negatively influencing the experiment.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a system and method that takes into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as other possible issues.